The gendered and racialized politics of risk analysis. The case of Frontex

Saskia Stachowitsch,Julia Sachseder

doi:10.1080/21624887.2019.1644050

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article develops a feminist postcolonial approach to risk analysis as an increasingly central security practice in the EU's emerging border management and security regime. For this purpose, we theorize risk analysis as a sense-making practice embedded within colonial power relations. As such, risk analysis problematizes migrants and migration in gendered and racialized ways that make them amenable to border management and other, potentially violent security practices, such as detentions, returns, surveillance, and Search and Rescue. In an exemplary frame analysis of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency's (Frontex) risk analysis report 2016, we show how conceptualizations of risks and solutions by this key actor are informed by gendered and racialized framings of 1) chaos and violence, 2) exploitation of the EU economic and welfare system, and 3) humanitarianism towards 'vulnerable' migrants. With this study, we seek to strengthen feminist and postcolonial interventions into critical security studies on knowledge, power, and expertise. By conceptualizing risk analysis as political, this article pushes critical security theory beyond understandings of security as socially constructed and towards systematically unpacking the meanings of (in)security as implicated in the reproduction of gendered and racialized power relations.

Highlights

Risk analysis has become a central security practice in today’s increasingly knowledge-based and intelligence-led security regimes
In the context of EU border security, risk analysis has attained a important role as a depoliticized tool in a controversial policy field characterized by opposing views of member states and the need for efficient resource distribution (Paul 2017)
While the problematic implications of the notion of risk and the importance of risk analysis in modern security regimes have been acknowledged and addressed in critical security studies (Aradau and van Munster 2008; De Goede, Simon, and Hoijtink 2014; Petersen 2011), this scholarship has so far not systematically studied the underlying assumptions and power relations that inform risk analysis and how they translate into concrete security practices

Summary

Introduction

Risk analysis has become a central security practice in today’s increasingly knowledge-based and intelligence-led security regimes. While the problematic implications of the notion of risk and the importance of risk analysis in modern security regimes have been acknowledged and addressed in critical security studies (Aradau and van Munster 2008; De Goede, Simon, and Hoijtink 2014; Petersen 2011), this scholarship has so far not systematically studied the underlying assumptions and power relations that inform risk analysis and how they translate into concrete security practices. This is relevant for addressing the gendered and racialized effects of security practices and their violent consequences for. SACHSEDER migrants, which have been widely documented and critiqued by feminist and postcolonial scholars in security studies (Basham and Vaughan-Williams 2012; Bosworth, Fili, and Pickering 2017; Carrera and Hernanz 2015; Chisholm and Stachowitsch 2016; Maguire 2010; Pickering 2014)

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